Can Mobile Phones Improve Factory Fire Safety?

The Tazreen Fashions plant after the fire in Savar, near Dhaka, Nov. 26.

In the wake of the fire at a Bangladesh factory that killed at least 112 garment workers on Nov. 24, U.S. and European retailers who buy from the South Asian country have said they will drastically improve safety checks at the factories they use.

The plans in the works include carrying out extensive fire assessments at vendor factories, in the case of one retailer, and hiring an engineer to check fire safety, in the case of another.

But few of the plans being considered by retailers seem likely to address issues that labor groups have raised with regard to the present safety audit system – that they don’t allow workers a way to alert retailers to issues that crop up when the brands’ representatives are not around. Another complaint is that information on fire safety is generally kept confidential and rarely shared in a comprehensive way with the workers most likely to be at risk.

Indian-American entrepreneur Kohl Gill is hopeful that cellphones, which are now widespread in exporting countries like Bangladesh and China, could help.

Through his two-year-old company LaborVoices, Mr. Gill has been developing a voice-activated system that workers can call to leave messages about workplace conditions.

“We anonymize that and we provide views on that information to other workers and to local organizations and to brands,” he said. “Eventually we’ll provide views to consumers as well so consumers can know how brands are being made.”

The information would be free to workers, and available by mobile phone; retailers would have to subscribe to the service, and then would have access to the information online. Callers will not be identified to retailers using the system, Mr. Gill said.

Mr. Gill said he’s working with a U.S. clothing retailer to implement the system at its factories in Bangladesh by early 2013, but declined to name the company. The system has been previously tested at an electronics factory in China, and at factories in southern India, he said.

In a January pilot, with about 20 garment factories in Bangalore and covering about 300 workers, employees left as many as 90 messages about work conditions.

Mr. Gill said he developed the phone service as a way to plug the gap in information that can be left even where inspection regimes are in place.

“Everybody we talk to knows inspections are broken,” said Mr. Gill, who previously worked on global labor relations at the U.S. State Department. “You can’t have an inspector going to every factory every month. It’s very expensive and there aren’t enough inspectors.”

When a fire at a Pakistan factory in September this year killed at least 283 people, the reliability of social auditing used by retailers was sharply questioned. The factory there had been certified as meeting standards developed by Social Accountability International , a leader in social compliance certification.

The organization has said it will publish a report on its findings about how the Pakistan factory was able to gain certification early next year. Labor groups have criticized SAI for not releasing the audit report of the factory. SAI has said that as part of the certification process, accredited certifying agencies sign contracts with factories that require confidentiality.

In an email interview, SAI founder Alice Tepper Marlin, said that confidentiality serves a purpose in the audit process.

“Confidentiality of the audit itself protects workers and promotes a greater willingness of factory owners and others to engage positively to improve working conditions for workers,” said Ms. Marlin. “Specifically, workers who speak out during audits, as well as other stakeholders with information about working conditions that can benefit workers, must be able to share that information freely, confidentially, and without fear of retribution.”

But in a new report on factory safety in the wake of the Bangladesh fire, the International Labor Rights Forum questions how well confidentiality truly serves workers. The reporters expressed concern about the fact that audit report findings are kept confidential, shared only with the clients that commission them and factory owners. Audits conducted of a factory for one supplier may not even be shared with other suppliers a retailer uses in that country.

Audits of Tazreen Fashions, the Bangladesh factory where the fire occurred, had highlighted fire safety problems such as blocked exits and the lack of sufficient firefighting equipment over a year before the fire, according to documents found at the factory site and verified by executives of the factory’s parent group. One supplier stopped using the factory; others did not, later citing unauthorized subcontracting as the reason production ended up there.

“Because audits are confidential, companies’ and auditors’ knowledge of problems is their private intellectual property,” said the labor rights group’s report. “In this case, doing the right thing—sharing factory lists and audit reports—might have saved lives.”

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